RESEARCH

In May 1843, twenty-four-year-old artist Richard Dadd returned home to London after spending several months honing his craft in the Eastern Mediterranean. His behaviour increasingly erratic, Dadd murdered his father and claimed that he had been compelled to do so by Osiris—the Egyptian god of the dead—to cleanse the world of heretics. Dadd was transferred to Bethlem Royal Hospital and Broadmoor Asylum for treatment, where he ultimately thrived due to the physicians’ compassion and adoption of a form of proto-art therapy.

During my master’s degree, I created a research project that used Dadd’s institutional life as a case-study to examine the “mad artist” cultural trope’s place in the histories of Victorian masculinity and asylum reform. The project was built on years of research with archival sources, including asylum case-notes, contemporary medical textbooks, memoirs, newspaper and journal articles about Dadd’s manhunt, and rare interviews.

I have edited my research project into a much shorter and more accessible essay to act as a companion piece to Yellow Sands; Or, Eight Tales of Pixie Mischief. Each copy of the album (through either Bandcamp or this website) is accompanied by a copy of the essay. It can also be read by pressing the button below.

Turning History into Musick

Written in Summer 2021, the Yellow Sands title track was the first song written for the album. It features lyrics inspired by Richard Dadd's travels in the Eastern Mediterranean and a case-note that Dadd would stare at the sun for hours on end: “The sands whistle and buzz / An orchestra of glass and dust / I stare at the sun.”

October 1843 - “… he believed himself to be the son of the sun, at which he indeed spends entire days staring without blinking … He receives inspirations from above which he could not resist by any means; it is this interior voice which compells him to put to death all devils (all those around him). These devils enter his body and he is often enraged because he is obliged to spit them out – he can see them in his saliva.”

Translated by Nicholas Tromans, Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), pp. 194–195.

Please find some of the more interesting passages from Dadd’s later case-notes below (some of the only in which he is not described as some variation of “quiet and orderly”):

14 August 1868 - “His conversation has more or less reference to spirits. The weather has been recently very hot, and he says he thinks that mad people suffer more from the sun than others because they have no spirit to intercede for them, and shelter them from the sun’s rays. Appears to be rather desponding his health, and says he is breaking up and that ‘it is quite time’.”

4 October 1873 - “Delusions that spirits enter his mouth, and he sometimes tries to cough or splutter them out; is unable to hold any lengthened conversation without becoming rambling and incoherent.”

14 May 1877 - “ … Describing the scene of patricide, he said he was impelled to the act of killing his father (‘if he was his father’ he said) by a feeling that some such sacrifice was demanded by the gods & spirits above. He said that they were walking side by side in Cobham Park when Richard suddenly sprang upon his father & stabbed him in the left side. When his father fell, Dadd (posing himself with upstretched arm), thus apostrophised the starry bodies ‘Go,’ said he ‘& tell the great god Osiris that I have done the deed which is to set him free.’”

Transcribed by Tromans, Richard Dadd, pp. 195–198.

While Richard Dadd’s story was the impetus for Yellow Sands, the album’s concept quickly grew beyond my original plan. Through my master’s research for Dadd, I became fascinated by the place of fairies in the Victorian popular consciousness. As Carol G. Silver has studied in her book Strange and Secret Peoples, fairies often represented cultural, sexual, and racial fears, and played a part in Victorian Britain’s desire to naturalize the supernatural. “Heavenly Bodies” engages with this topic—its chorus was inspired by the fairy gods Oberon and Titania, who feature prominently in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Titania sleeps in my body, in my mind / Unquiet dreams are intertwined / Years away, welled to the waters and the wild / They’re passing slow as they smile.” Notably, this story was adapted by countless Victorian artists, including Richard Dadd. Aspects of “Heavenly Bodies” lyrics were also inspired by the cosmic elements of Dadd’s delusions.

References to fairies pop up in other songs on the album, including “Sleeper,” which adapts A Spell for a Fairy, a historical poem by Alfred Noyes: “Gather in your left hand / Forty grains of yellow sand / Warm, fluttered, and sweet / And may her heart beat.” A piece of Yellow Sands’ album artwork is derived from one of the illustrations that accompanied the poem when it was collected in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, an anthology of children’s stories and illustrations by popular writers and artists.

Yellow Sands changed dramatically when my partner fell ill. It feels like a cruel coincidence that I had obsessively researched disease and written songs about the subject before it significantly altered our lives. I found that the language and themes from these historical sources provided me with a way to process my emotions while also combining two different worlds that I’m equally as passionate about.

References to historical treatments and Victorian sciences (like mesmerism) and theories of disease (like miasma) are littered throughout the album’s eight songs. Although the song was written and mostly recorded before my partner was diagnosed with cancer, “Lovelace”—named after chronically ill Victorian mathematician Ada Lovelace—became a central piece of the album. Moments from “Lovelace” are later reprised in “Water Lilies,” the final song written for (and on) the album. Ada also had many connections to fairies, as artist Julie Bovee has noted here.

While I don’t wish to dissect every lyric on the album, I do hope that this brief glimpse behind the curtain was somewhat interesting. For those who’d like to read more about these odd and curious topics, I’d recommend checking out the following list of books from your local library (or buy them!):

• Jay, Mike. This Way Madness Lies: The Asylum and Beyond. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2016.

• Micale, Mark S. Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

• Milne-Smith, Amy. Out of his Mind: Masculinity and Mental Illness in Victorian Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.

• Scull, Andrew. Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

• Silver, Carole G. Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

• Stein, Dorothy. Ada: A Life and a Legacy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987.

• Tromans, Nicholas. Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum. London: Tate Publishing, 2011.

Thank you for your time in reading these ramblings! I hope you enjoy the album and feel free to reach out to me via the Contact page!

-Quinn